Constructing the final cut of our music video was the longest part of the whole process, once we had done our filming we took all of the footage to our computer and looked through it all, we organised it and named all of the shots that we wanted to use and this was a long process which took us about 3 hours. Once we had finally decided what shots we were going to use we imported them into Final Cut Express so that we could edit our final music video.
The first shots that we put in were the verses, this is because we wanted the verses to have a lot of shots of the whole band so that you could see them all contributing and you could see the lead singer miming accurately to the words. We didn't want to just have one shot of the band throughout the whole of the verse so we also put in close ups of the guitar and the drums to make it more interesting. When we found it hard to fill a part of the song we left it blank, like shown above, this is so that we could get as much done of the video as we could then we could go back to the blank parts later and fill them in with appropriate shots that would fit in.
A really tedious part of the editing process was waiting for the shots to render, this really slowed down the whole video making because we would have to wait for 5 minutes per shot usually, as well as this, if you rendered a shot, then decided to make it a tiny bit longer or put a slow motion effect on it would would have to AGAIN wait for it to render, this meant that we were spending about 6-7 minutes per shot making sure it was perfectly placed in the sequence.
Another part of the process that we found difficult and time consuming was the testing of shots, we could see exactly how the shot would look against the song until we actually put it in final cut and placed it, it was only then that we started noticing things in the background like doors so we would have to either delete that shot or make it short, if the lip syncing was even a second off then it was really difficult to edit it into the song so when filming we had to make sure it was perfect and if it wasn't then we re-shot, we ensured that out lead singer knew the words and wrote them on a white board and put it behind the camera just in case he needed prompting, I think that it is for this reason that the lip syncing in our final cut is so much better than what was in our rough cut.
Once we got about half way through making our video, we decided to put in the ending before finishing it, this is because we could then see how our video was going to end so we could build a climax at the end of our video leading up to the finale so we planned what shots we were going to use accordingly.
Once we had done the verses and put in the ending we filled in the chorus', we wanted to feature the majority of our close ups in the chorus' because we feel like that is when our song was the most exciting so we wanted to use the close ups to emphasise this so we used close ups if the lead singer, guitar being played and the drums being played, when editing we made sure that the instruments fitted in well with the song and looked like they were actually being played so that our music video would look more authentic.
Once we had finally finished our music video we converted it using quick time conversion, we did this so that our music video would be in a format that could be uploaded to Youtube and then put on our blog as opposed to just posting a link, converting our music video took a really long time, about an hour, so when it was done we were anxious to just put it on Youtube and get it posted onto our blog.
The next, and final step was to upload our video to Youtube, this as well took a really long time and we had a few moments when we thought that it just wasn't going to work and we would have to find another way to put it on our blog, however, thankfully it eventually uploaded and we were able to get the embed code and post it on our blog.
On Friday, we showed our video to our media class in order to gain some feedback which would evidently help us to improve our Final Cut even further. Showing it to our media class meant that we got the perspective of a media student so they would be able to notice more mistakes such as errors in continuity editing, as well as this, we are going to show the video to non-media students and see how the feedback differs
A lot of the feedback that we got generally said that we need to focus on our continuity editing, and make some of the shots a bit shorter because there wasn't a huge variety of angles and camera shots, we plan to change the editing and put some more shots in to make it look more authentic as well as making sure that is editing is continuous and the transition between shots is smooth.
As well as getting feedback from our classmates, we also got feedback and comments from our teacher, this allowed us to imrpove our work even further because we can combine the feedback from all three outlets and hopefully come out with a product that looks authentic and improved.
